The present disclosure generally relates to the field of electronics. More particularly, an embodiment of the invention relates to unbounded transactional memory systems.
To improve performance, some computer systems may execute multiple threads concurrently. Generally, before a thread accesses a shared resource, it may acquire a lock of the shared resource. In situations where the shared resource is a data structure stored in memory, all threads that are attempting to access the same resource may serialize the execution of their operations in light of mutual exclusivity provided by the locking mechanism. This can be detrimental to system performance and may cause program failures, e.g., due to deadlock bugs.
To reduce performance hits resulting from utilization of locking mechanisms, some computer systems may use transactional memory. Transactional memory generally refers to a synchronization model that allows multiple threads to concurrently access a shared resource (such as a data structure stored in memory) without acquiring a lock as long as the accesses are non-conflicting, for example, as long as the accesses are directed to different portions of the shared resource.
Transactional memory may be implemented through a table lookup mechanism. In particular, to access a shared resource, a thread may first check a table stored in memory to determine whether another thread is accessing the same portion of the shared resource. Accessing a table that is stored in memory may generate overhead that decreases performance.